NSLog();

I've met Robert Wiener (and his mother), but I'd never seen the movie Live from Baghdad until today. It was on HBO and I was bored. Not a bad movie, and Helena Bonham-Carter doesn't look half bad either (though, truthfully, Michael Keaton is a bit better looking). I think the movie would have been far more interesting were I able to remember the events of early 1991 more clearly than I can now, but hey, it beats watching reruns of Trading Spaces.

A lot of the spam I receive comes from the future. I presume that this is because most people sort their email by date, and by sending email from 2016, spammers believe they'll stay higher in a person's list.

SpamSieve grabs all of my email and shoves it into folder I've named "* Shit" (to sort it where I'd like it), but mail from 2016 hinders my ability to scan the last 100 messages for false positives. So, I wrote an AppleScript and I now run it once an hour. Here's the script:

NSLog(@"Finish Reading %d Words", 161); »

Question: If you were to write George W. Bush's whitehouse.gov bio (see the previous entry on Clinton's), what would the first sentence say?

My Answer: "After stealing the oval office in a controversial recount, "Dubya's" largest achievement in his single term in office was barely holding together the country, fractioned by those who saw him as a blithering idiot and those who argued 'we should just go along with him because it's not patriotic to disagree with those you (don't actually) elect."

I tried to write a serious one, but I simply couldn't do it. I've quite honestly yet to hear any single "good" thing from the past couple of years. Granted, I don't pay much attention, but the fact remains: all I've heard has been "bad." Less privacy. Far-reaching new laws that do more to threaten the rights of law-minded citizens than terrorists (who don't abide by U.S. laws, duh). Etc.

As I said in an IM today, "I thought I was a Republican until he came into office."

You are encouraged to answer the Question of the Day for yourself in the comments or on your blog.

In some random surfing today, I came across Bill Clinton's Bio on the whitehouse.gov site. It says:

During the administration of William Jefferson Clinton, the U.S. enjoyed more peace and economic well being than at any time in its history.

My question: do they allow the presidents to write their own bios?

I'm updating some documentation for some products today (new site, new products, later today!) and printing them to PDF. I'm using AppleWorks, primarily for familiarity and because LaTeX doesn't give me all the control I need. Unfortunately, there exists a problem when printing to PDF. You can see the problem in the image at right.

It's probably an AppleWorks problem (as the software is, what, five years old?). It seems that AppleWorks and the PDF renderer have different ideas as to how wide particular fonts may be. This wreaks all sorts of havoc on our table of contents (where we have a series of periods, a tab, and then the page #).

Any ideas? Saying "yeah, AppleWorks' font handling leaves a lot to be desired" isn't an answer, but saying "yes, AppleWorks is using a different method to calculate font widths (it doesn't take into account anti-aliasing)" is acceptable. Is that the answer?

As I prepare for a full day of work on what should be a "day off," I've come to the realization that I simply haven't got the time to run Cocoa Dev Central anymore. So, one of three things can occur:

1. I sell the site to someone who will maintain it.
2. I keep the site but turn over control to someone.
3. I shut down the site entirely.

In the first case, I can easily say that the site makes a hundred or so dollars per month on the Google ads alone, and as it hasn't been updated in quite some time, has the potential to make a lot more than that.

In the second case, as I'd still be hosting the site, any profits made would be split between the new caretaker and myself (probably 75/25).

The third case is simply disappointing.

Anyone interested in options one or two? Let me know by comment here (leave an email address - a URL will cover it up from spambots entirely, but will provide it to me) or email (see the bottom left of this page for my address).

Question: How many licks does it take to get to the tootsie roll center of a tootsie pop?

My Answer: 42. That's the meaning of life, too. 🙂 Or, if you're like me, about 3 - then I bite through it.

You are encouraged to answer the Question of the Day for yourself in the comments or on your blog.

José and I ventured out into a bit of rain and an entirely overcast day today to get in some fishing near the Boca Inlet at a widening of the intercoastal known as "Lake Wyman" (it's not a lake, dammit, it's just a wider part of the intercoastal!). I had no idea what we'd catch, but the Top Spot map said "La," indicating "ladyfish." The poor man's tarpon, I told José as we packed up.

NSLog(@"Finish Reading %d Words", 343); »

Robert Scoble is up to it again. Up to what? Being stupid. Let's have a look:

1. He wants Longhorn to set the highest resolution possible out of the box (and really, he wants XP to do it too). He repeats this same error many times: turning on advanced features out of the box and requiring the newbies to turn them off. Thing is, newbies are by definition probably not going to know where to go to turn off a feature! What's worse, in this case, Scoble is in favor of saying "screw you" to anyone who is handicapped with poor or failing eyesight (who might have bought a 20" display to use at 800 x 600). Users with good eyesight can always make the text tiny at 1600 x 1200, but users with poor eyesight aren't going to be able to read or see the screen if it's set to that resolution out of the box.

NSLog(@"Finish Reading %d Words", 713); »

I didn't say I killed my wife.
I didn't say I killed my wife.
I didn't say I killed my wife.
I didn't say I killed my wife.
I didn't say I killed my wife.
I didn't say I killed my wife.
I didn't say I killed my wife.

Stolen from someone else but his point is accurate: it's nifty how each of the above sentences has a different meaning.

Question: QotD: How would you describe your first kiss?

My Answer: Mind-wracking. I was thinking faster than ever, which I'm certain resulted in a less than stellar performance. After all, if 99% of your energy is focused on examining what you're doing, and how you're doing it, the "naturality" of a kiss is lost. You don't move your hands (and then when you do, it's because you realize you haven't moved them in a natural fashion at all, which is not natural), for example. It's horribly terrifying and exciting at the same time.

You are encouraged to answer the Question of the Day for yourself in the comments or on your blog.

Ahhh, behold, the power of Unix. I hadn't "processed" orders for Freshly Squeezed Software for over 190 days, leaving me with some thousands of emails to process. Every day we get an order summary (tab delimited text file listing all orders for the day prior). For each order we get two emails, one mirroring the email sent to the customer and another for us. All told: thousands of emails.

The daily tab-delimited text files are stored in an Excel document (with a different tab for each product). The order emails (two per order) are stored in a FileMaker Pro database (one database per product). With thousands of emails in a single folder, how was I to do this easily? Would you believe me if I told you that I spent about ten minutes in total getting the data out of Entourage and into Excel and FileMaker Pro? Here's how…

NSLog(@"Finish Reading %d Words", 391); »

PHP Syntax Checking in BBEdit. Just bookmarking that for later.

Things I've gotta do tonight: move a few months of customer data to some FileMaker databases. It's not going to be fun. Not at all. I will be spending much time in AppleScript. 🙂

File this under "I'm listing this for myself." And, to spare you, I'm putting it in the extended entry…

NSLog(@"Finish Reading %d Words", 683); »

Question: How cold is "cold"?

My Answer: I'm from PA, land of the sideways-falling snow ("lake effect"). We know what a "wind chill" is, and as such, anything over 0°F is considered "chilly" at worst.

You are encouraged to answer the Question of the Day for yourself in the comments or on your blog.